In the countryside of a quiet Lithuanian town, sounds of a vanished shtetl have returned to life. Voices chattering in Yiddish mingle with clucking chickens, crowing roosters and accordion music drifting through a bustling outdoor market. Children’s laughter cuts through the murmurs of synagogue prayers punctuated by an enthusiastic chorus of “amen.”
The audio echoes through the new Lost Shtetl Museum, which uses immersive storytelling to recreate the rich heritage of Lithuania’s shtetls — small, predominantly Jewish towns of 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe that functioned as vibrant centers of Jewish life and culture before being almost entirely obliterated during the Holocaust. These closely knit, religiously observant communities occupy a powerful place in Jewish history and consciousness, both for their vitality and the tragic way they disappeared.
The museum, which opened in September just before Lithuania’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, offers an intimate window into the kind of thriving town most famously memorialized in the movie Fiddler on the Roof. The Lost Shtetl Museum preserves shtetl life and loss by focusing on the small agricultural town of Seduva in the country’s north during the interwar years between 1918 and 1940.
Central to recreating the Seduva shtetl experience are the custom-designed soundscapes that envelop visitors in daily rhythms of the past as they progress through the themed museum galleries.
“It’s about trying to be honest and true to the location, but also give people a sense of the bedlam that was there,” Joel Beckerman, a composer, producer and founder of Made Music Studio, a New York-based sonic design firm that created the soundscapes for the museum, said in an interview. The thrum comes through clearly in the soundscape of the market, a cacophony of live animals, merchants, shoppers and roving musicians.
Listen to the buzz of a shtetl marketplace
Immersiveness has become a hallmark of the modern museum experience, from interactive life-size digital versions of historical figures recounting their stories with the help of AI to high-resolution floor-to-ceiling video projections that steep viewers in the realities of climate change.
To infuse the Lost Shtetl Museum with sounds rooted in historical and geographic accuracy, Beckerman’s team, which included composers and technologists, consulted historians affiliated with the museum. They learned which birds would have chirped in local parks, what produce was sold at markets and even the types of shoes shoppers would have worn. They investigated how wooden carts would have sounded as their wheels churned through muddy roads after rainfall and how haggling over prices in a shtetl market might have unfolded.
They then gathered sounds — some preexisting, others originally designed — and carefully blended them to suit various themed galleries.
For the open-air market, for example, the team sought auditory details that conveyed not only how central the market was to commerce, but how deeply it functioned as a hub of community life. “It really is just trying to find those little, tiny moments that made the marketplace so lively,” Beckerman said.
Sounds Of Life, Sounds Of Destruction
While the soundscapes of the market and synagogue evoke nostalgia for everyday shtetl life, another captures the chilling fate of Seduva’s 600-plus Jews. This audio track, which museum visitors hear in the Holocaust gallery as they walk through a space called the Transport Corridor, blends the flapping of bird wings and buzzing flies on a warm summer day with the heavy footsteps and rumble of trucks arriving to transport Jewish residents to a barbed-wire ghetto. There, they were crammed in squalor before being shot to death and buried in mass graves in the Liaudiskiai forest with the help of local Nazi collaborators.
Chilling sounds of residents facing dislocation
The result is a somber, unsettling experience that underscores how ordinary life gave way to annihilation across Europe. Nearly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews, 95 percent of the country’s prewar population, were murdered during World War II.
Beckerman and his colleagues have created original scores for over 50 television series and specials, including CBS This Morning, Entertainment Tonight, ESPN’s 30 for 30 and the Super Bowl on NBC. They have also worked on character development and select scoring for experiences such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disney theme parks.
This project, however, stands apart, Beckerman said. For one thing, Made Music Studio consciously avoided the heart-pumping, attention-grabbing tropes of film soundtracks, opting instead for subtle auditory textures that complement the experience rather than distract from it. For another, the subject matter itself carried unusual weight.
“It really is a career highlight for us being able to work on something so meaningful and important,” Beckerman said.
Moving Beyond Sentimentality
That the museum aims to present a multifaceted picture of shtetl life — one that emphasizes piety, creativity and familial bonds alongside loss — is essential, said Steven Zipperstein, a Stanford University historian of Judaism and Jewish culture.
Hear a shtetl synagogue, recreated through sound
Despite the abject poverty and violent antisemitic attacks that led many Eastern European Jews to leave shtetls between the late 1880s and the 1920s, the term shtetl (Yiddish for little town) has become synonymous with “the town that I’ve come to sentimentalize,” Zipperstein said. “The ingredients that go into sentimentality are complex, because often you end up feeling affection for a place you’re actually glad to have fled, or at least left behind.”
“It’s valuable to be able to concretize that past to best understand it and see beyond the kind of popular constructions as reflected in Fiddler on the Roof,” the professor added. “It’s important for all the reasons that an accurate sense of the past is important.”
The Lost Shtetl museum — designed by a team led by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, with exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates — was conceived as a “ghost” of a shtetl that emerges in the Lithuanian landscape. It stands adjacent to a restored Jewish cemetery in Seduva and drew inspiration from the simple, saddle-roofed forms of traditional Lithuanian buildings.
Inside the light-reflecting anodized aluminum facade, viewers will find historic images, video testimonials from descendants of the Seduva shtetl, cinematic reenactments and historical objects. Among them: a prescription label for eye drops from Goda Bordon’s Pharmacy; a book filled with farewell verses and drawings classmates left for Hinda Zarkey when she departed Lithuania for the United States in 1937; and coin-shaped amulets with blessings inscribed that parents hung around the necks of their firstborn sons.
“The final design was fundamentally shaped by Seduva itself and by the personal memories connected to it,” Büke Kumyol, RAA creative director and associate, said in an interview. “Our decisions were guided by stories gathered from descendants of Seduva’s Jewish community, as well as surviving letters that reveal everyday life, dreams and struggles.”
Robotics Meet A 20th Century Village
Other museum sights include a glass wall displaying 588 handblown colored glass panels that represent Lithuanian’s erased communities. At the center of the marketplace gallery, an interactive 3D map of Seduva rises from the floor. Carved from white marble with a KUKA Robotics arm, the map’s interactive projected layer allows visitors to see how residents moved through the town and explore homes, shops and other spaces that shaped their lives.
“These aren’t just media interfaces, but windows into lived experiences,” said Dan Cooper, director of Dot Crew, a museum partner that specializes in digital storytelling. “When technology becomes invisible and authentic human stories take center stage, we know we’ve honored these memories properly.”